“Make google search suck less” is something that they didn’t consider.
Defeat the competition by making a good product yourself?? I don’t think so! Stifling innovation is the only way to succeed!
Anyone who never got a chance to use Google Now back in the day really missed out! One of Google’s most useful products to date. It would provide you with the most useful/timely information before you even knew you needed it. Word is, it was so useful that people stopped needing to actively use Google’s services to get the info they needed so they scrapped it. Bastards.
I remember when you could find what you were looking for by googling it. Those were good days. Seriously though, google search, google maps and many other google products simply do not work anymore. They deliberately removed functionality for short term monetary gain and have lost the dominance they once had simply due to their products not working the way they did 10 years ago.
They have no interest in making search better. When 2 out of every 3 searches go through your platform either way, good results lead to fewer page loads which results in lost ad revenue. How are they going to afford to pay Apple $18 billion/year if everyone is getting the info they need?
Google is still the best in my experience, at least for stuff I search for. As long as they’re just slightly better what reason do they have to improve?
Trying to get back to Google after a few years on DDG then Qwant felt really off. Kagi was the real deal for me but it is still to expensive for the average consumer 😕
$5 is too expensive? People have $1,200 phones on financing, buy $5 coffee on the way to work, still drive gasoline vehicles when fuel is $4-6 (in the states) to go ~20 miles, pay $16 for Netflix… like whut? Shit, I’m disabled and living off social security and I still found room in my budget for $5.
My last experiences with Google were non-trivial privacy policy consent request popups that made me leave.
The one before was having to clean up my mother’s laptop after she installed a popular FOSS program from a search result ad infested with ad and malware.
Yeah there was just an article on ars about malware from an ad pretending to be keepass.
